Elsie embraced her warmly, whispering that she couldn't explain, but it was truly all right. The next day she got a post-office order and sent the money to Elsie Marley without saying that it hadn't come from the lawyer in California as the other sums she had forwarded had done. Consequently, when a letter came from Mr. Bliss saying that he couldn't let Elsie Marley have the five hundred dollars she had asked for without an order from her guardian, she felt obliged to withhold it entirely. It troubled her to do so, and weighed upon her mind afterward. She told herself that she would, of course, explain when she saw Elsie Marley, and meantime--it was, after all, nothing but a formal business communication, not a real letter, and of no account in that the business itself had gone through. Still, it seemed a great pity that there should be any concealment between herself and the other Elsie. As things stood, she was sufficiently involved in concealment, to give it no worse name, without that. It had been understood that she should read all the letters that came before sending them on to Enderby; but to keep one and never mention it, necessary though it was, and demanded by circumstances, seemed somehow almost like stealing. And the worst was that circumstances might go on making demands, and she might have to do yet more reprehensible things--things that weren't merely _almost_ like wrong-doing. Some day she might have to lie right out. Well, as to that, what had it been when she said that her mother's name was Pritchard? That had been acting--a part of her role. And then, of course she constantly deceived Miss Pritchard, in a way, though not dishonestly. That was acting, too. She and Elsie Marley had entered into a contract, indeed, each to act the part of the other. They weren't hurting any one: each fitted into the wrong place as she couldn't have into the right. And yet in very truth it was very much like plain lying! Elsie Moss flinched. Then she recollected how once at home some of the girls of her class at school had been discussing a subject given in the rhetoric they studied under "Argumentation"--"Is a lie ever justifiable?" These girls of the "Per aspera ad astra" motto had decided the question in the affirmative. They had agreed that lying to a burglar wasn't wrong--it might prevent him from robbing a widow or one's own mother--the same with regard to a murderer, an insane person, or one sick unto death. And one and all had declared with spirit that if they lived in England and a hunting-party should come along with their cruel hounds and ask which way the fox or hare had gone, they would point in exactly the wrong direction. Elsie herself had declared that she would have said that the little creature hadn't come this way at all.